Tension over change at church

Korean-Americans struggle to retain language and tradition

Stephen Han's sermon has the cadence of a TED Talk. He paces across the stage, stopping at a table to glance at his notes.

His oratory echoes around the hall, and his audience — a mix of mostly young adults and worshippers in their 40s — hangs on his every word about the Book of Nehemiah.

He drops a Super Bowl joke — after all, it's the day of the game. "If you don't know who Tom Brady is, get a life," he says.

Han is the lead pastor at Young Nak Celebration Church, a Korean church in Los Angeles that holds all of its services in English.

Across the street, another house of God — with a nearly identical name — attracts hundreds to its Sunday services held in Korean. At Young Nak Church, a sermon comes with a traditional touch, reminding its immigrant members of the services they used to attend in Seoul. A choir of about 100 Koreans sits behind the altar as the pastors read aloud from a Korean edition of the Bible.

The two Presbyterian ministries were once united. What was intended as a model of interdependence has over the last decade grown into an argument over how Korean their church should be.

In recent years, this tension has emerged within many ethnic churches in the United States as they struggle to preserve their home countries' cultures while new generations become increasingly Americanized.

Other ethnic Asian congregations and Latino churches face the same challenge as their members become second- and third-generation Americans who practice faith in different ways.

Young Nak Church was founded in the 1970s as an ethnically Korean congregation with Korean-language services for the first wave of Korean immigrants who came to Los Angeles.

As its members had children who grew more accustomed to the United States, an English-speaking ministry, with its own leadership and its own budget, opened to keep the next generation engaged.